It was tonally, I think, very different – very different - because I went back to kind of “Unbreakable” aesthetics and so there’s a very strong visual sense in the movie that changes the tone of the movie.
This movie is the most delicate movie. I can’t imagine having a more delicate movie. It just did not work until everything worked. It was just pieces until everything was perfect, every single thing. You got the pace right, you got the music right, the sound effects. It just wouldn’t work. I literally thought we were in trouble. It went from like no movie to heaven in like ‘boom’ like that, because it was just so delicate. It wouldn’t let me do anything to it that it didn’t want.
Would a good metaphor by like a piece of music like a symphony, or putting a puzzle together?
Yeah. I think even in the final mix, we had this amazing violin dominated score – it’s just a beautiful, beautiful score (James Newton Howard did the score) – but we had this violinist named Hilary Hahn to play. Hilary Hahn is 23, the same age as Bryce [Dallas Howard], and she’s considered one of the top 3 violinists in the world. And some consider her the best violinist in the world. We asked her to do the score so she came in to be the female voice, to continue the female voice – the strong female voice in the movie. She killed it! It was like she came in and it was a concert. She stood up there in front of the orchestra and this little girl – she actually has reddish hair too – and she stood up there and [played]. And everybody just [was] floored. And when we put that onto the movie, it was like another actor was in the movie suddenly. It didn’t lay in the way you would think. Because William Hurt was yelling and then she’d be like [imitating a violin played very fast] so it was like two people conversing. You kind of had to ride it in such a way it wasn’t working until you worked it in like another actor. And everything [else], all the way down to there was a scene I was mixing and all of a sudden it wasn’t working for me. All of a sudden after all these months it wasn’t working. “What happened? What happened?” And they’re like, “You’re insane. It’s working. It’s great. It’s great.” I said, “No, something’s wrong. Take it all apart.” And we took it apart and we found out there was a foley – a foley is a sound effect that you do, there’s guys in a room and they make all the sound effects and then we lay them in – and they’d put in a footstep, her footstep, before she did a line. And the footstep was aggressive, you know? Strong, and it changed her line. Her line was different because she came at it angrily and then said the line. It was different, it was not innocent. So I said, “You’ve got to make it soft. She’s tentative when she says that.” And that changed the scene. That’s the kind of movie it was. It would only work when everything, the symphony, was working together.
What major changes occurred between the first draft and the final version?
Scott Rudin, the producer, I hired him and this was about not being safe because I wanted Scott to come in and just challenge the hell out of me. He did “The Hours,” which I love, and so I called Scott up and I said, “Hey, can you come on this?” And he did what he does. “Why is this here? What’s going on here? I don’t believe this?” I was like, “Oh jeez.” And that was at the end when I thought the script was done. He really pushed me. It really needed to happen because I couldn’t do what I’d done on “Signs,” which was write the sofa scene in two hours. You can’t do it because the dialogue is so specific and I had to go research in how would she express this. How would they express anger? You know, all this stuff and you had to learn to speak in a different language. He really pushed me on that. And when you see the movie, you’ll see there’s a whole lot going on and he really strengthened these other layers going on. I’ve got to give him a lot of credit. He just kept pushing me to the point I was like, “It’s done. I am done, dude.” It really changed quite a bit, quite a bit.
How did you decide to set “The Village” in the past instead of in the present like your other films?
Well, this is the kind of question I’ve been asked a lot in the junkets, in the press junkets. And really the answer is that I actually have a farm I live in that was actually built in this time period. It’s kind of a little bit uninspired and mundane that I was in a house that looked like that and looked out and saw the woods and went, “Hmmm. That’s kind of scary.” But really it was “Wuthering Heights” that got me kind of high about doing this period.
